The realities of the current economic and business environment dictate that organizations must have in place a strong Business Continuity Plan (“BCP”) to ensure that, in the event of a man-made or natural disaster, the operations and activities of the organization can continue with little to no interruption. In general, a well-designed BCP specifies how an organization will recover and restore partially or completely interrupted critical functions within a predetermined time after a disruption.
Business Continuity Clustering (“BCC”) ensures that in the event of an isolated server problem or even a severe calamity, an organization's systems function normally and without noticeable service interruption. BCC connects and synchronizes independent, often geographically dispersed, clusters of servers, or nodes. If a data center's cluster fails for any reason, the other clusters assume the workload thereof to ensure non-stop access to mission-critical data and resources. In short, BCC provides synchronization among geographically dispersed clusters; however, BCC does not provide managerial functions for individual resources per se. In other words, in BCC, when a primary cluster fails, the entire operations of the primary cluster are moved to one or more secondary clusters without regard to the particular resources being employed. In the case of split-site clusters, the cluster at each site generally needs only to determine whether it is authorized to take over the resources at the remote site. Normally, clusters perform only local decisions based on a “quorum” concept.